You might know more biology than me, but I think you messed up your reasoning (in two places). First, the math: there are four equally probable combinations of X and Y. You have a 25% chance of YY (certain death). What's left are the following possibilities: Linus contributes X Alan Y; Linus contributes Y, Alan X; Linus contributes X Alan X. The last is only way to get a girl. This means it's twice as likely you'll get a XY rather than an XX. Well, that's for one mistake. I would have let it slip if you hadn't said "You obviously either have little or no understanding of genetics, or statistics, or both" before going on to say something blatantly false.
As far as the heritability of intelligence goes, there is tons of data showing that IQ is hereditary. Of course, there is no "proof" that IQ has any relevance to intelligence, because that's not the sort of thing that you prove. Intelligence is a way of behaving, so it is in principle measurable. On every proposed method of measuring intelligence, we find that it is inherited (which is to say that the intelligence of the people who contribute the genetic material is statistically significant to the intelligence of the offspring). It's fine to be an ostrich about these studies, but less so to get all high and mighty about how smart you are and then blurt out crap.
This is a great trend. I hope Netflix keeps growing. However, their distribution center bottleneck seems stupid. Here is my idea.
Buy the rights to install several Netflix drop-boxes in every city. Guarantee that the disks will be considered "checked in" on the night they are dropped off. Then hire someone to feed the returned disks into a sorter which reads their barcodes, prints new envelopes with the address of the closest person for whom the movie is in the #1 queued position. (If there's no one like that, check who has it as their #2, etc.) Then, send it directly from the city where it was dropped off instead of funneling it through the headquarters each time. Furthermore, whoever does the local nightly sorting of the arrivals would also have a mailing address, so you could mail the disks to a place in your city rather than further. This means they'd have to hire a couple of extra part-time workers, but their service would improve by a lot, and importantly, they would have a local presence without having to pay rent for a high-visibility location with shelfspace.
Also, there's nothing really preventing them from eventually having parallel "conventional" rental outlets in addition to their mail buisiness. They could compliment each other. For example, I'm sure that if we saw all the disks that spend each night in the California headquarters, that, in and of itself, would probably be the best-stocked video store in town. Using that principle, their other reigeonal centers could eventually morph into dual-operations stores. They would look like video rental places but in reality work like exclusive libraries with a kick-ass ILL program that delivers to your door on request. I imagine all this could be done for a membership fee rather than a per-use fee.
This is one way in which we might defeat the evil Blockbuster. It's not obvious the cure is better than the disease, but here's one reason why it might be: Blockbuster in my town is more of a traditional monopolist in that it uses pretty dirty tactics to starve out locally-owned video stores. Basically, they open a branch almost literally next door. That branch loses money for years, because the great majority of people prefer the local store. However, Blockbuster HQ have deep pockets and patience. Eventually, they pull away just enough customers from the locally-owned store that it has to close. Then the city belongs to Blockbuster, and suddenly their stores become profitable as they absorb all the former customers of the local store. Anyway, this clearly falls into the category "legal but evil," and because it's evil I refuse to give a dime to the Blockbuster dicks. However, services like Netflix could not possibly establish such monopolies, because if they became huge and started to screw us the way Blockbuster does now, we would just switch to a better/cheaper mail-in DVD rental club. The only change in our renting habits would be that we return our disks to a different address--we'd hardly notice. In other words, this sort of store can't dominate a reigeon like Blockbuster can, and it can't wipe out direct competition like Blockbuster can. So I say: fight on, Netflix. When you open a local branch here in NY, you're likely to have me as a customer. Meanwhile, I will continue to check out my DVDs from the public library, where the selection is great, loan periods are a week, and the cost to me is nothing. There are very few DVDs that are not in our public library system. I will probably get those from Netflix.
Here is my vision: buildings in a city have many mutual laser connections, sort of like virtual wires. Some of those laser connections would be connected by fiber to the internet backbone. Now let's say I'm somewhere down the chain from the backbone and I want a certain IP packet. Well, if there is a "web" of laser links connecting buildings (say each one is connected to five others), something like the IP protocol could decide which path would be the best one for my packets to take. This would result in a pretty efficient system, where little bandwidth is wasted and the loads are for the most part balanced. Lasers that can do this will not stay expensive forever, and actually, these devices could be pretty simple, which means they might eventually be cheap. Then, We he People could truly host our own intenet, and there's nothing the FCC could do about it, because we wouldn't be hogging any frequency.
I bet that gigabit lasers with a range of 1 km will become reasonably affordable, because there really wouldn't be much to them. Entire neighborhoods could wire themselves together without requiring permits from anyone (and maybe split the cost of a fiber connection to the internet backbone).
There was a thread not long ago about how people with high IQ and advanced education are having far fewer babies than the minimum replacement rate (data gathering was limited only to intustrialized countries). If intelligence has anything to do with IQ and is also to some degree hereditary (plausible assumptions), the inevitable consequence is that evolution currently serves to make humans dumber with every generation.
However, I think many parents who want the best for their children but for some reason cannot produce their own would want to use genetic material from people they admire. This way, you could "adopt" the spawn of Natalie and Linus, and the inconvenience to the two of them would be minimal.
Here's a question you could take as serious, or as a joke--it works both ways...
If you wanted a baby but couldn't use your own genetic materials, who would you want the "parents" to be? I look forward to responses (limit them to people whose DNA is readily obtainable).
Also, it's worth keeping in mind that though this is first being tried with unmodified human eggs, other research shows that we can substitute any human DNA we want into the nucleus of the egg. This means that if we injected Linus DNA into the egg and had AC generously contribute some sperm, we could spawn an unholy kernel-child. There would even be a 25% chance it would be a girl. If we assume the eggs are from reproductive-aged organ donors, creating this child would be very little trouble for both Linus and AC. Not only that--your neigbors could order a Linus/AC spawn and try to raise it too.
It would be strange, but not in any obvious way a bad thing. For one thing, it would help counteract the possible deevolution problem we worried about last week. I think it would be a fine way to pay tribute to the greats: have them provide the DNA for the children you raise. I wonder who would hold the record for most sired children? (I have a feeling I don't want to know the answer, because it's probably someone like Leonardo DeCaprio. Hmmm. Maybe this really wouldn't help against deevolution.)
What do you mean "close the code?" I thought the topic (allegedly) on the table is whether to keep the liberal X11 license or switch to the more restrictive LGPL, which wouldn't allow commercial entities to distribute binary-only revisions of WINE. "Closing the code" usually refers to a switch to a non-OSS license. I presume (and hope) that's not on the table....
Damn... I was hoping we could have an internet world elections in the near future.
The trend that the USA will be our world boss will probably continue. Seeing that the choice of US president probably has as much impact on citizens of other countries as it does on US residents, I think we should let foreign citizens have some say as to who our president is. In a very real way, s/he governs the entire world, so most of the world is being governed without its consent. Internet voting would be one easy way in which we could give foreigners some input into our elections.
(BTW, this is a joke, in the sense that I know this could never happen--though I do seriously think it would be the right thing to do, and the world would become a better place because of it.)
This debate is OVER! Slashdot is a month late.
on
WINE May Change To LGPL
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I've followed this somewhat closely, and it is indeed true that there has been a discussion about the LGPL. This debate was held openly, with Alexandre actually advocating the LGPL switch. However, Codeweavers programmers and other core WINE hackers gave some excellent reasons for staying on the less restrictive license, and Alexandre quickly saw that there wasn't enough support among the important contibutors and politely backed down.
I thought their open debate was interesting enough that I submitted it here on Slashdot. However, the issue is now dead. They are NOT changing to the LGPL. Please leave the WINE coders alone and let them write code. They deserve credit for having a very civil and constructive debate about licensing issues, in a climate where flamewars are the rule when the issue gets brought up. WINE coders are not only excellent programmers, but they are also wise for having settled the issue. This "Jeremy" may be a smart guy, but his position lost out. Him trying to stoke up the issue and cause dissention in the improbably civil WINE community does not seem very smart to me. Last year was the time to discuss this. Now is the time to shut up and code.
So long as the anti-nuke folks don't kill the proposal in Congress, we've just taken a big step towards putting a person on Mars.
Well, that's just it: I really don't expect that Congress, currently on the kick "we must protect all Americans" is going to be excited about the potentially dangerous nuclear propulsion system. The truth is that a lot of radioactive material would have to be launched into space, and if there is an explosion on takeoff, a good chunk of Florida will a pretty unpleasant place to live.
This line item is purely political. Bush knows that Democrats will be the most vocal opponents of this, and then he'll blame it on them that the NASA is so underfunded. I don't think he seriously expects this increase to go through; he just cares about the cuts. As is the case with international treaties, I'm afraid the space program is another thing for which our frat boy president doesn't see any motivation. It's a shame, but it's by far not his worst crime.
Welcome to something that has been going on for quite some time. Seriously, the only recent development mentioned in this article sounds suspiciously like a product placement for that software (which does stuff that GPL'd programs have been able to do for a while).
There is indeed an active TV show trading scene, recently segments of this market are starting to really look official. For example, there is the Digital Archive Project (no link provided because I don't want you lusers crashing their site) which has managed to encode 90% of the MST3K episodes and is working on the other 10%. That's almost 150 CDs worth of DivX data! Their distribution system is quite impressive, and at least in the USA, it seems their activities are legal.
IANAL, but I'd like to hear from someone who is/can ask one whether the Betamax decision protects our rights to share recorded broadcasts with our friends. (The precedent is, a videotape of a show is legal if it's made for personal use, and playback can be time-shifted and occur somewhere other than the place where it was recorded. Well, actually, I don't know how broadly this applies...)
There are many people who have every Simpsons episode on their hard drive, and even more who have every South Park (they've only had five seasons). There already is a video napster: it's called Electic Donkey--and there's also a lot of stuff going around on DC. This Boston Globe reporting is hardly front-line journalism. But I guess the vitality of the TV show trading community may be because the mainstream media have largely ignored them--so here's to hoping we go back to that.
No, the environment is not changing in any way relevant to evolution (in the way that prevents some but not others from reaching reproductive age and producing offspring). Sure, there might be a terrible disease in the future, and that might cause something like evolution, because once is over, the survivors will most likely be immune to the disease. That is a sort of evolution. But these people will be no different from us now except for the one feature, namely, the disease immunity. They will not have an extra toe or less hair or something. So even in this extreme case, it doesn't look to me like what happens looks much like evolution, because there is no change in phenotypic traits.
This is wrong too. There is no evidence that the average-looking have fewer children than the beautiful. In fact, from the literature that I know, beautiful people tend to pair with financially successful members of society, and financially successful families tend to have fewer children (far below the replacement rate). It wouldn't surprise me if beautiful people would, on the average, have fewer children than the ordinary-looking.
Your analogy is false (though interesting). It breaks down because a lion cub needs to be raised with lots of effort if it is to reach reproductive age. Even an abandoned child in an industrialized country has an excellent chance of reaching reproductive age, so all the effort you put into raising children probably hinders their chances of having many children of their own. (The highly educated are much less likely to have many children, and their children are likely to themselves be highly educated, making it unlikely that the genes of the highly educated survive many generations.)
Personally, I've spent so much time in graduate school that I don't expect to have time for a family, and I don't regret this. I have no sibblings, which means that my family line will end with me. Sometimes this makes me sad, because there are some pretty impressive people in my family who have done a lot for society. However, in strict evolutionary terms, we are not "fit", because we are drawn to leisures like education and birth control. People with other priorities will be the ones who repopulate the Earth.
... such a device will refuse to play any content that does not have the proper signature, regardless where it came from.
Oh, I see. This wasn't in the article, though--it was strictly about downloading and streaming media to handhelds. It's quite possible you're right. However, if consumers can't freely load their legally created MP3s into a certain PDA, this will create a pretty big market for alternative PDAs that do allow this. (This will break no law; cf. the Rio decision.) As storage density increases further, media files on general-purpose handhelds will make sense. Still, the worst case scenario is that you have to carry around two separate devices: one for scheduling/games/etc. and the other for media playback iPaq style.
I am quite unafraid of these developments. I never expect to download media to a handheld device. If I want control over the songs I listen to while I jog or sit on the train, I'll bring an iPaq or something similar. If I want someone else to pick the music for me, I'll tune to the radio. If I want the internet... well, that part will stay free.
Who the hell do they think will pay for media streamed to handhelds? I can only vaguely imagine such people (the types that leave their cell phones on in the opera house). I won't shed a tear if it turns out that MS milks them.
Besides, if portable devices are connected to the internet with decent bandwidth, I'm sure that computer-only services that provide media without DRM will make a mobile device frontend, and you'll be able to get the same media on the handheld. Still, I don't quite see the point, but maybe that's a sign I'm getting old.
I fear you're right, and I think this just shows Debian and Red Hat are not really interested in delivering its customers a good product. If anything kills Linux, this sort of hardheadedness will be it. Soon, Windows will start looking pretty good again.
BBC is the propaganda arm of the London government, and as such, its wide availability does a big service to the UK. As a Brit you should rejoice that all of Africa and many other places in the world swear by the BBC. I think it's the most popular station in Afghanistan, and has been even under the Taliban, who couldn't jam it because Taliban soliders would revolt if they couldn't listen to BBC soap operas. I'm not kidding! What this sort of penetration means is that the world tends to see things your way even before you send in the tanks and bombers. It's also much cheaper.
As an American, one thing I like about the BBC is that it doesn't lay on the propaganda quite as thick as domestic media sources.
As far as other state-run content sources, the NPR homepage has a lot of stuff. In some ways it's better than the BBC, because all of their major programs are saved as.rm files and you can play them back in pieces any time. (If only they'd be OGG files...) The CBC has a similar deal--a bit smaller, but the content is a bit better. For news, I'm also a fan of the Deutsche Welle and the Tagesshau. I find the German world news to be a bit more objective than the BBC. I know there is also a French equivanlent, but my French is very bad. In the last few months I also really wished I spoke Arabic, because the Al Jazeera site seems to have a lot of content. Hey, if Americans feel they need to bomb it, it's got to be good! (Though I guess Al Jazeera isn't state-run.) Anyway, there are a lot of news sources online. If you sift through a wide range of them, you can sort of zero in on the truth. The BBC is a good site, thought I think their news coverage is often pretty shallow.
But remember: you can gush all you want about the BBC's OGG decision--but I have a feeling the BBC is more interested in how many people are actually tuning in. The best way to get this to stay up is to really listen... and it's worth doing, especially if you're in the US and want 15% less state propaganda in your news. I don't just mean now, as long as this story is on the/. homepage, but next week, too...
Well, I'll take the ticket, but I won't stay unless you can also get me a work permit there. I'd be happy to let this ship sink with fools like you on board (while I surf the net on UWB in a country that at least makes an effort to be a democracy).
He is an idiot, but perhaps you are right, he neither knows or cares one bit about frequency allocations. Still, he is the one who appoints the head of the FCC, and guess what: it's Colin Powell's son, an unellected pro-big-buisiness right-winger who thinks there's nothing finer than corporate welfare for the companies that bought off the administration (er--"purchased frequencies"). So this is not a low blow. In fact, this administration is the single biggest hinderance to any progress on the UWB. We should be looking to replace them with some people who might act in the interest of the public.
From the bit of web research I've done on this, the FCC will block UWB--at least as long as there is a Republican administration in power. Their line is "we need to do more research (and we're prepared to repeat this line ad infinitum)." Well, tough shit for North America.
I have faith, however, that Europe, India, China, Korea, Brazil and other civilized countries will switch to UWB, and thumb their noses at us US-Americans. Well, we deserve it. Still, it's depressing, and makes me wish I lived somewhere else.
It's stupid to interpret the article as saying that GCC should be retired. Of course it's more versatile than a x86-specific compiler.
What the upshot should be is that any x86 application which is released in binary and not compiled with the Intel compiler is cheating the user about 20% in performance. In other words, Linux distributions would look much more impressive if they were pre-compiled with this compiler, and the entire Linux community (who doesn't build their own kernel/apps--which is most Linux users) is being short-changed.
The sad fact is that until RPM/APT packagers switch to the new compiler, every task done on Linux will be slower that in Windows. Every "Linux is fine as it is, however that may be" apologist is just making the whole OS look stupid.
What we really need is a centralized gang of package-makers (perhaps at Sourceforge) who paid for the Intel compiler and have some nice machines, which are totally dedicated to compiling major releases of popular GPL apps. Failing that, we can only hope that Red Hat et. al. will use the Intel compiler to make all their future RPMs. They'd be stupid not to.
Well said! I personally think IBM would be stupid to not hire Cox if he goes on the market. Their numerous research labs would be perfect for him (plentnty of geeks with beards and black t-shirts).
Slashdot Mirror
As far as the heritability of intelligence goes, there is tons of data showing that IQ is hereditary. Of course, there is no "proof" that IQ has any relevance to intelligence, because that's not the sort of thing that you prove. Intelligence is a way of behaving, so it is in principle measurable. On every proposed method of measuring intelligence, we find that it is inherited (which is to say that the intelligence of the people who contribute the genetic material is statistically significant to the intelligence of the offspring). It's fine to be an ostrich about these studies, but less so to get all high and mighty about how smart you are and then blurt out crap.
Buy the rights to install several Netflix drop-boxes in every city. Guarantee that the disks will be considered "checked in" on the night they are dropped off. Then hire someone to feed the returned disks into a sorter which reads their barcodes, prints new envelopes with the address of the closest person for whom the movie is in the #1 queued position. (If there's no one like that, check who has it as their #2, etc.) Then, send it directly from the city where it was dropped off instead of funneling it through the headquarters each time. Furthermore, whoever does the local nightly sorting of the arrivals would also have a mailing address, so you could mail the disks to a place in your city rather than further. This means they'd have to hire a couple of extra part-time workers, but their service would improve by a lot, and importantly, they would have a local presence without having to pay rent for a high-visibility location with shelfspace.
Also, there's nothing really preventing them from eventually having parallel "conventional" rental outlets in addition to their mail buisiness. They could compliment each other. For example, I'm sure that if we saw all the disks that spend each night in the California headquarters, that, in and of itself, would probably be the best-stocked video store in town. Using that principle, their other reigeonal centers could eventually morph into dual-operations stores. They would look like video rental places but in reality work like exclusive libraries with a kick-ass ILL program that delivers to your door on request. I imagine all this could be done for a membership fee rather than a per-use fee.
This is one way in which we might defeat the evil Blockbuster. It's not obvious the cure is better than the disease, but here's one reason why it might be: Blockbuster in my town is more of a traditional monopolist in that it uses pretty dirty tactics to starve out locally-owned video stores. Basically, they open a branch almost literally next door. That branch loses money for years, because the great majority of people prefer the local store. However, Blockbuster HQ have deep pockets and patience. Eventually, they pull away just enough customers from the locally-owned store that it has to close. Then the city belongs to Blockbuster, and suddenly their stores become profitable as they absorb all the former customers of the local store. Anyway, this clearly falls into the category "legal but evil," and because it's evil I refuse to give a dime to the Blockbuster dicks. However, services like Netflix could not possibly establish such monopolies, because if they became huge and started to screw us the way Blockbuster does now, we would just switch to a better/cheaper mail-in DVD rental club. The only change in our renting habits would be that we return our disks to a different address--we'd hardly notice. In other words, this sort of store can't dominate a reigeon like Blockbuster can, and it can't wipe out direct competition like Blockbuster can. So I say: fight on, Netflix. When you open a local branch here in NY, you're likely to have me as a customer. Meanwhile, I will continue to check out my DVDs from the public library, where the selection is great, loan periods are a week, and the cost to me is nothing. There are very few DVDs that are not in our public library system. I will probably get those from Netflix.
I bet that gigabit lasers with a range of 1 km will become reasonably affordable, because there really wouldn't be much to them. Entire neighborhoods could wire themselves together without requiring permits from anyone (and maybe split the cost of a fiber connection to the internet backbone).
There was a thread not long ago about how people with high IQ and advanced education are having far fewer babies than the minimum replacement rate (data gathering was limited only to intustrialized countries). If intelligence has anything to do with IQ and is also to some degree hereditary (plausible assumptions), the inevitable consequence is that evolution currently serves to make humans dumber with every generation.
However, I think many parents who want the best for their children but for some reason cannot produce their own would want to use genetic material from people they admire. This way, you could "adopt" the spawn of Natalie and Linus, and the inconvenience to the two of them would be minimal.
Here's a question you could take as serious, or as a joke--it works both ways...
If you wanted a baby but couldn't use your own genetic materials, who would you want the "parents" to be? I look forward to responses (limit them to people whose DNA is readily obtainable).
Also, it's worth keeping in mind that though this is first being tried with unmodified human eggs, other research shows that we can substitute any human DNA we want into the nucleus of the egg. This means that if we injected Linus DNA into the egg and had AC generously contribute some sperm, we could spawn an unholy kernel-child. There would even be a 25% chance it would be a girl. If we assume the eggs are from reproductive-aged organ donors, creating this child would be very little trouble for both Linus and AC. Not only that--your neigbors could order a Linus/AC spawn and try to raise it too.
It would be strange, but not in any obvious way a bad thing. For one thing, it would help counteract the possible deevolution problem we worried about last week. I think it would be a fine way to pay tribute to the greats: have them provide the DNA for the children you raise. I wonder who would hold the record for most sired children? (I have a feeling I don't want to know the answer, because it's probably someone like Leonardo DeCaprio. Hmmm. Maybe this really wouldn't help against deevolution.)
Yeah, and what's more, the fetus never has to listen to the mother yelling at people, etc. It might end up less stressed out.
What do you mean "close the code?" I thought the topic (allegedly) on the table is whether to keep the liberal X11 license or switch to the more restrictive LGPL, which wouldn't allow commercial entities to distribute binary-only revisions of WINE. "Closing the code" usually refers to a switch to a non-OSS license. I presume (and hope) that's not on the table....
The trend that the USA will be our world boss will probably continue. Seeing that the choice of US president probably has as much impact on citizens of other countries as it does on US residents, I think we should let foreign citizens have some say as to who our president is. In a very real way, s/he governs the entire world, so most of the world is being governed without its consent. Internet voting would be one easy way in which we could give foreigners some input into our elections. (BTW, this is a joke, in the sense that I know this could never happen--though I do seriously think it would be the right thing to do, and the world would become a better place because of it.)
I thought their open debate was interesting enough that I submitted it here on Slashdot. However, the issue is now dead. They are NOT changing to the LGPL. Please leave the WINE coders alone and let them write code. They deserve credit for having a very civil and constructive debate about licensing issues, in a climate where flamewars are the rule when the issue gets brought up. WINE coders are not only excellent programmers, but they are also wise for having settled the issue. This "Jeremy" may be a smart guy, but his position lost out. Him trying to stoke up the issue and cause dissention in the improbably civil WINE community does not seem very smart to me. Last year was the time to discuss this. Now is the time to shut up and code.
Well, that's just it: I really don't expect that Congress, currently on the kick "we must protect all Americans" is going to be excited about the potentially dangerous nuclear propulsion system. The truth is that a lot of radioactive material would have to be launched into space, and if there is an explosion on takeoff, a good chunk of Florida will a pretty unpleasant place to live.
This line item is purely political. Bush knows that Democrats will be the most vocal opponents of this, and then he'll blame it on them that the NASA is so underfunded. I don't think he seriously expects this increase to go through; he just cares about the cuts. As is the case with international treaties, I'm afraid the space program is another thing for which our frat boy president doesn't see any motivation. It's a shame, but it's by far not his worst crime.
Well, it will be announced on April 1, but it won't ship until May. That's not insider info; just a guess.
There is indeed an active TV show trading scene, recently segments of this market are starting to really look official. For example, there is the Digital Archive Project (no link provided because I don't want you lusers crashing their site) which has managed to encode 90% of the MST3K episodes and is working on the other 10%. That's almost 150 CDs worth of DivX data! Their distribution system is quite impressive, and at least in the USA, it seems their activities are legal.
IANAL, but I'd like to hear from someone who is/can ask one whether the Betamax decision protects our rights to share recorded broadcasts with our friends. (The precedent is, a videotape of a show is legal if it's made for personal use, and playback can be time-shifted and occur somewhere other than the place where it was recorded. Well, actually, I don't know how broadly this applies...)
There are many people who have every Simpsons episode on their hard drive, and even more who have every South Park (they've only had five seasons). There already is a video napster: it's called Electic Donkey--and there's also a lot of stuff going around on DC. This Boston Globe reporting is hardly front-line journalism. But I guess the vitality of the TV show trading community may be because the mainstream media have largely ignored them--so here's to hoping we go back to that.
No, the environment is not changing in any way relevant to evolution (in the way that prevents some but not others from reaching reproductive age and producing offspring). Sure, there might be a terrible disease in the future, and that might cause something like evolution, because once is over, the survivors will most likely be immune to the disease. That is a sort of evolution. But these people will be no different from us now except for the one feature, namely, the disease immunity. They will not have an extra toe or less hair or something. So even in this extreme case, it doesn't look to me like what happens looks much like evolution, because there is no change in phenotypic traits.
This is wrong too. There is no evidence that the average-looking have fewer children than the beautiful. In fact, from the literature that I know, beautiful people tend to pair with financially successful members of society, and financially successful families tend to have fewer children (far below the replacement rate). It wouldn't surprise me if beautiful people would, on the average, have fewer children than the ordinary-looking.
Personally, I've spent so much time in graduate school that I don't expect to have time for a family, and I don't regret this. I have no sibblings, which means that my family line will end with me. Sometimes this makes me sad, because there are some pretty impressive people in my family who have done a lot for society. However, in strict evolutionary terms, we are not "fit", because we are drawn to leisures like education and birth control. People with other priorities will be the ones who repopulate the Earth.
Oh, I see. This wasn't in the article, though--it was strictly about downloading and streaming media to handhelds. It's quite possible you're right. However, if consumers can't freely load their legally created MP3s into a certain PDA, this will create a pretty big market for alternative PDAs that do allow this. (This will break no law; cf. the Rio decision.) As storage density increases further, media files on general-purpose handhelds will make sense. Still, the worst case scenario is that you have to carry around two separate devices: one for scheduling/games/etc. and the other for media playback iPaq style.
Who the hell do they think will pay for media streamed to handhelds? I can only vaguely imagine such people (the types that leave their cell phones on in the opera house). I won't shed a tear if it turns out that MS milks them.
Besides, if portable devices are connected to the internet with decent bandwidth, I'm sure that computer-only services that provide media without DRM will make a mobile device frontend, and you'll be able to get the same media on the handheld. Still, I don't quite see the point, but maybe that's a sign I'm getting old.
I fear you're right, and I think this just shows Debian and Red Hat are not really interested in delivering its customers a good product. If anything kills Linux, this sort of hardheadedness will be it. Soon, Windows will start looking pretty good again.
As an American, one thing I like about the BBC is that it doesn't lay on the propaganda quite as thick as domestic media sources.
As far as other state-run content sources, the NPR homepage has a lot of stuff. In some ways it's better than the BBC, because all of their major programs are saved as .rm files and you can play them back in pieces any time. (If only they'd be OGG files...) The CBC has a similar deal--a bit smaller, but the content is a bit better. For news, I'm also a fan of the Deutsche Welle and the Tagesshau. I find the German world news to be a bit more objective than the BBC. I know there is also a French equivanlent, but my French is very bad. In the last few months I also really wished I spoke Arabic, because the Al Jazeera site seems to have a lot of content. Hey, if Americans feel they need to bomb it, it's got to be good! (Though I guess Al Jazeera isn't state-run.) Anyway, there are a lot of news sources online. If you sift through a wide range of them, you can sort of zero in on the truth. The BBC is a good site, thought I think their news coverage is often pretty shallow.
Primary ogg-related feedback address: oggfeedback@bbc.co.uk
The BBC itself has a pretty extensive feedback gathering mechanism: here are online feedback forms you can fill out:
Feedback form about the BBC website/services
Feedback form about BBC Radio
BBC News suggestions form
But remember: you can gush all you want about the BBC's OGG decision--but I have a feeling the BBC is more interested in how many people are actually tuning in. The best way to get this to stay up is to really listen... and it's worth doing, especially if you're in the US and want 15% less state propaganda in your news. I don't just mean now, as long as this story is on the /. homepage, but next week, too...
Well, I'll take the ticket, but I won't stay unless you can also get me a work permit there. I'd be happy to let this ship sink with fools like you on board (while I surf the net on UWB in a country that at least makes an effort to be a democracy).
He is an idiot, but perhaps you are right, he neither knows or cares one bit about frequency allocations. Still, he is the one who appoints the head of the FCC, and guess what: it's Colin Powell's son, an unellected pro-big-buisiness right-winger who thinks there's nothing finer than corporate welfare for the companies that bought off the administration (er--"purchased frequencies"). So this is not a low blow. In fact, this administration is the single biggest hinderance to any progress on the UWB. We should be looking to replace them with some people who might act in the interest of the public.
I have faith, however, that Europe, India, China, Korea, Brazil and other civilized countries will switch to UWB, and thumb their noses at us US-Americans. Well, we deserve it. Still, it's depressing, and makes me wish I lived somewhere else.
What the upshot should be is that any x86 application which is released in binary and not compiled with the Intel compiler is cheating the user about 20% in performance. In other words, Linux distributions would look much more impressive if they were pre-compiled with this compiler, and the entire Linux community (who doesn't build their own kernel/apps--which is most Linux users) is being short-changed.
The sad fact is that until RPM/APT packagers switch to the new compiler, every task done on Linux will be slower that in Windows. Every "Linux is fine as it is, however that may be" apologist is just making the whole OS look stupid.
What we really need is a centralized gang of package-makers (perhaps at Sourceforge) who paid for the Intel compiler and have some nice machines, which are totally dedicated to compiling major releases of popular GPL apps. Failing that, we can only hope that Red Hat et. al. will use the Intel compiler to make all their future RPMs. They'd be stupid not to.
That would be a great twist, especially if JLG came back as CEO. :)
Well said! I personally think IBM would be stupid to not hire Cox if he goes on the market. Their numerous research labs would be perfect for him (plentnty of geeks with beards and black t-shirts).